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Category: Book
Classic of the Week: Nicholas Nickleby
David Ellis looks at Charles Dickens’ third novel. Classic of the Week: Nicholas Nickleby If there were a prize for the most unpleasant character in Nicholas Nickleby it would be hotly contested. Prominent among the contestants would of course be Wackford Squeers, the ignorant barbarian who runs a school in Yorkshire for boys whose parents… Read More
‘He do the Police in different voices’
As Charles Dickens’ last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, is adapted for BBC Radio 4, Sally Minogue looks at the novel’s relationship to his world and to ours. I’ve just spent a few days in London, where this blog was very much on my mind. In Our Mutual Friend (1865), as often in Dickens’ novels,… Read More
The Witch’s Curse: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Female Gothic
Something for Halloween… The Witch’s Curse In the great pantheon of Victorian British literature, Elizabeth Gaskell is among its most versatile authors. Of course, she will always be associated with her powerful industrial novels Mary Barton and North and South. But there is also the progressive social protest of Ruth – a contentious novel in… Read More
Kate Chopin: Two Stories
Kate Chopin was not a conventional woman. She was a professional writer at a time when it was unusual and somewhat irregular for a woman to have such an occupation. She was unconventional though, before she became a writer and shocked her in-laws with her behaviour which would have seemed most unladylike in New Orleans… Read More
Sherlock Holmes in 1924: A Centenary
Sherlock Holmes fiction probably conjures up images of fog bound London streets, hansom cabs and cosy scenes in 221b Baker Street with its Victorian décor. However, this year marks the centenary of the publication of three particular Sherlock Holmes short stories and it may seem strange to think of Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s. ‘The… Read More
Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’
‘The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations’ (Count Leo Tolstoy) In this final blog on a trio of great Russian novels, Sally Minogue suggests reasons for thinking that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the greatest of the three. The… Read More
Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’
‘The idea is to depict an absolutely wonderful person.’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1867) Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ The Idiot is the novel in which Dostoevsky attempted the difficult experiment of creating a central character who embodied goodness. Sally Minogue looks at the resulting fiction. The Idiot (1869) was the first of the big Russian novels that I… Read More
Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’
‘The great drama of his life was the struggle for a better state of things in Russia.’ (Henry James on Ivan Turgenev) The publication of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) caused an unprecedented sensation in Russia. Sally Minogue has a look at its contemporary context, and at the novel as we might read it today. … Read More
The Golden Age of Russian Literature
At the start of a short series of blogs on three nineteenth-century Russian novels, Sally Minogue considers their powerful ongoing appeal. The Golden Age of Russian Literature I have mentioned in an earlier blog on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov the fascination that the great Russian novels of the nineteenth-century exerted on me as a… Read More